At first, Norman Rockwell and Richard Halpern don't
seem like such a great match.

Rockwell you know: painter of puppies, apple-cheeked Boy
Scouts, twinkle-eyed Santa Clauses, and the old swimmin'
hole; illustrator of 322 Saturday Evening Post
covers; creator of images that adorn uncounted calendars,
cookie tins, and refrigerator magnets; celebrator of an
idyllic, nostalgic American past. Halpern you probably
haven't met: Yale-educated Johns Hopkins professor of
English,
Shakespeare scholar, author of several books of literary
criticism, and museum-goer who appreciates contemporary
art. Just the sort of person one would imagine to dismiss
Rockwell as a kitschy sentimentalist, a popular
illustrator, not an artist.

But Halpern does not dismiss Rockwell at all. After
spending years engaged in a close reading of the painter's
work and life, he has arrived at some startling
conclusions. Rockwell, says Halpern, painted a lot more
than nostalgia-tinged innocence. Ignore the received wisdom
about the painter and take a good long look at Rockwell's
work. Yes, you'll see innocence, but you'll also see
darkness, sexual perversity, voyeurism, desire, and
sophisticated musing on masculinity and femininity, what
Halpern calls "weirdness in the midst of the ordinary and
commonplace." That son discovering Santa/Dad smooching his
mother on the stairway in Christmas Surprise? He's a
voyeur unexpectedly learning the facts of life. The
illustration of two entwined Boy Scouts practicing
knot-tying in the 1946 Boy Scout calendar? A comment on the
boundaries between asexual friendship and Eros. The
half-naked little boys bolting from the pond in No
Swimming? Rockwell's take on The Swimming Hole,
a subversively sexual painting by 19th-century American
painter Thomas Eakins that depicts a group of handsome,
naked young men standing on and diving off a rock.

Halpern has turned his iconoclastic take on Rockwell into a
book, Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence
(University of Chicago Press, 2006), and as you might
imagine, it has attracted more than a little vitriol. He
has been called an elitist, a pervert, and a "whacked-out
professor of higher education."

"The book's purpose wasn't to point out potentially naughty
bits in a Rockwell," Halpern says. "And I wasn't just
trying to say there's a sexual content to Rockwell's
painting because that would make it sound like a
clichéd Freudian reading of the art. What I want to
say is that Rockwell is thinking about innocence and he's
using this to test the viewer to see how much of this kind
of material you can absorb without acknowledging it. This
was also his way of meditating on how innocence is
constructed by disavowing things that are right in front of
your face.

"I don't have anything against Norman Rockwell. I love
Norman Rockwell's work. In writing this book I was trying
to enhance people's appreciation of him, and in fact I was
making stronger claims for his status as an important
artist, a status that has eluded him up to this point."

And for the record, "I don't have anything against Mom and
apple pie, either."

Exhibit A: Girl at Mirror (1954)

A girl on the verge of puberty sits in front of a mirror in
an attic, her back to the viewer. She's wearing an
old-fashioned white nightgown and holds a magazine in her
lap, flipped open to a photograph of 1950s sexpot Jane
Russell. The girl is studying her own face in the
reflection. On the floor by her bare feet are a vintage
doll, an open tube of lipstick, a comb, and a brush.

Red — the color of sexual passion — is
everywhere in the painting. Halpern points out a red stool,
a red hairbrush, red lipstick, all the artist's way of
suggesting the girl's budding sexuality. And the image of
Jane Russell, all sultry and sexy, looks up at the girl
from the magazine with an appraising stare. But for a real
insight into what Halpern calls "the underside of
innocence" in Rockwell's work, take a look at the doll. "I
think the posture of the doll is a little strange," Halpern
says. "Its skirts are hiked up and it seems to have the
mirror's edge pressed between its legs."

A viewer might say that the doll's derrière-in-the-air
pose looks surprisingly sexual. Another might counter that
the doll was simply tossed aside by the girl, or in that
position when Rockwell painted the image. Halpern says one
only has to look at key evidence from other Rockwell
paintings — paintings in which a number of dolls seem
to be in provocative positions — to see that this
doll's placement is no accident. "This is a case where you
read an image against another image and your take becomes a
little more compelling," he says.

This isn't just about a doll's weird pose. Halpern says the
doll serves to suggest the girl's pending loss of
innocence. He also believes that Rockwell uses the doll in
the painting as a reference to classical paintings of the
goddess Venus and her mirror. "With artists like Velasquez
and Titian, there's a Cupid figure that's holding up the
mirror to Venus so she can view her image. I think that
doll invokes that tradition. Obviously the little girl is
not the goddess Venus. But Jane Russell, the Hollywood
star, is sort of our culture's counterpart to what a
goddess would be."

Halpern specializes in Renaissance literature, with
an interest in literary theory. In graduate school at Yale,
he studied, with Harold Bloom and others, the influences of
Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud on literature. "Yale was a
hotbed of critical theory in the '70s and '80s — it
was the place where French critical theory was finding an
American audience for the first time," Halpern says. This
had a major impact on his scholarly pursuits.

Although literary theory isn't at the forefront of all that
he does, Halpern says his work tends toward the
theoretical. In a previous book, Shakespeare's Perfume:
Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud and
Lacan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), Halpern
applied psychoanalysis to the tradition of aesthetic
thought. In the book, he argues that sodomy becomes
entangled with aesthetic issues, and that it bears an
especially close relation to an aesthetics of the sublime.
"I wanted to bring together two things that didn't seem
like they belonged together," he explains.

This bringing together of two seemingly disparate subjects
occurs again when Halpern looks at Rockwell and sees his
darker side. The idea for studying America's most
well-known artist first came to Halpern about 20 years ago
when he ducked into the small Norman Rockwell museum housed
in the Curtis Publishing Company building in Philadelphia,
the former home of the Saturday Evening Post. He
hadn't paid much attention to Rockwell before, and the
images surprised him. "In the midst of all this banal
innocence I saw strange things going on," he says. He
remembers looking at Rockwell's 1957 Saturday Evening
Post cover Just Married, in which two hotel
maids stand outside a couple's honeymoon suite. "What
struck me as odd was they were holding a dustpan of
confetti and they were looking at it with smiles on their
faces," he says. Clearly, he thought, the confetti was a
substitute for some kind of wedding night waste. "The
perverse pleasure they had seemed so blatant to me, I was
just surprised to see that."

Halpern didn't think much more about Rockwell until about
10 years ago, when he was at the Whitney Museum's Biennial
show in New York and came upon some paintings by Eric
Fischl. Fischl is an American contemporary painter known
for his disturbing scenes of suburban family life.
Something about Fischl's paintings reminded Halpern of
Rockwell. "There was a Fischl painting of a mother and son
nude and sitting in chaise lounges around a hotel pool at
night," he says. "It was a very peculiar image because on
the one hand it was suffused with this weird sense of
suburban calm, and on the other hand this mother and son
were unclothed. It was this juxtaposition of disturbing
sexual elements and almost oppressive normalcy that
reminded me of an inversion of Norman Rockwell." Rockwell
has a sort of bland utopian surface, but there's something
hidden in that, Halpern says. "Rockwell's work is about the
secret sexuality of the banal, and Fischl's portraits are
about the secret banality of the sexual."

"In the midst of all this banal innocence I saw strange
things going on," Halpern says of his trip to a Rockwell
museum.

Through his research, Halpern learned that Fischl and
Rockwell weren't dissimilar. Both were figurative painters
who worked in a narrative mode. Both liked to make jokes on
canvas. And Fischl had an interest in Freudian themes. Did
Rockwell share this interest? Halpern — who saw
Rockwell and Fischl as kindred spirits — suspected he
did. Soon after making the connection between the two
artists, he decided to write the book. "Looking at Fischl
helped me to understand Rockwell," he says.

Though he collects art and goes to museums, Halpern is not
an art historian. To write about an artist without formal
training in art history was intimidating, but freeing in a
way, he says. "I have an amateur's interest in art, and for
writing about Rockwell that seemed appealing to me," he
says. "The ways I experience art are not unrelated to some
of the ways Rockwell experienced art. The art world always
raises the question of whether you are an insider or an
outsider. I feel like I'm both. I received a good general
education, so I'm an insider. I'm interested in
contemporary art but I don't follow it as closely as some
people I know, so I'm an outsider."

This tension of identity is something Rockwell himself
struggled with throughout his career. "The question of
whether he was an insider or an outsider tortured
Rockwell," Halpern says. "Was he part of the art world or
was he a joke?"

Halpern wanted to write about Rockwell, but not in a
traditional academic way. "It would be silly to write about
someone who was such a popular artist in a way only
academics could understand," Halpern says. "I didn't want
this to be a work of scholarship. I was interested in
talking about Rockwell in a different way."

Exhibit B: Art Critic (1955)

In a museum, a young male art student, clutching painting
supplies and an exhibition catalog, holds a magnifying
glass up to a portrait of a Rubenesque lady. He is aiming
it so close to the brooch on her ample chest that three men
look askance at him from a Dutch painting on the adjoining
wall. Meanwhile, the lady in the painting leers
appreciatively at the student.

The Freudian dimensions of this painting swim into view,
Halpern says, when we are let in on Rockwell's private
joke: Jarvis, Rockwell's son, is the model for the art
student and Mary, Rockwell's second of three wives, is the
model for the lady. So the painting plays with the idea of
an Oedipal relationship between mother and son. "This is
not simply a witty image of incest," Halpern writes. "It is
an image whose wit itself is incestuous. Like incest
itself, then, the joke turns inward — away from the
shared open realm of public meanings and exchanges, and
into a secret, shameful space."

The Oedipal connection in the painting isn't just for
people who know the identities of the models. Halpern says
that in the picture, Rockwell alludes to Oedipus and the
Sphinx, by J. D. Ingres. The student in Rockwell's
painting has a stooping posture similar to that of Oedipus
in the 19th-century work, and the generous
décolletage of the lady in the Rockwell echoes the
bare breasts of the Sphinx in the Ingres. "I think anybody
who looks at the way those two paintings are constructed
will see there's a case of allusion there," he says. "To
add an allusion to a painting like Oedipus and to do
it in a painting where there is a kind of Oedipal joke
going on indicates that Rockwell is thinking about this
fairly carefully and he's working it out in a complicated
way. Rockwell was well-educated in the traditions of art
history. He often alludes to other paintings in his work.
And although he had a fairly rapid rate of output, he was a
smart, sophisticated kind of painter. It's all carefully
worked out."

Norman Rockwell may be famous for his idyllic images
of small-town life, but his own life was hardly idyllic,
Halpern discovered through such volumes as Norman
Rockwell: A Life, by Laura Claridge (Random House,
2001) and the artist's autobiography Norman Rockwell: My
Adventures as an Illustrator (Curtis Publishing,
1979).

Rockwell and Mary suffered from clinical depression. He was
anxious about money, insecure about his looks and
masculinity, fearful that he would run out of cover-worthy
illustrations for the Post, and worried about his
place (or lack of one) in the art world. He was no
innocent. Innocence is "an ingrained habit of denying what
one knows and doesn't want to know," Halpern asserts. And
Rockwell, in My Adventures as an Illustrator,
admitted he was under no illusions about the nature of his
art. "Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn't the
perfectly pleasant place I had thought it to be, I
unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal
world, it should be and painted only aspects of it —
pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or
self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there
were only Foxy Grandpas who played football with the kids,
and boys fished from logs and got up circuses in the
backyard. If there was any sadness in this created world of
mine it was a pleasant sadness. If there were problems,
they were humorous problems. The people in my pictures
aren't mentally ill or deformed. The situations they get
into are commonplace, everyday situations, not the
agonizing crises and tangles of daily life."

Yet, amid these ideal images, Rockwell inserted references
to other painters, jokey asides, and other things that were
of interest to him. As Halpern studied Rockwell's
paintings, he saw certain themes arise again and again.
Rockwell was fascinated with mirrors and used them as a way
to obscure and highlight what was really in his
illustrations. He was fascinated with the idea of peeping,
spying, and otherwise looking in and being looked in upon.
He liked to show people's rear ends — a part of the
body that appeared in his paintings as undignified and
vulnerable, humorous but still sexualized. "There's
indisputable evidence that for Rockwell, sometimes sexual
jokes are planned in, that they are part of the paintings,"
he says. "But also I think that if you just look at enough
of his paintings carefully enough and fully enough you'll
just see the same sort of things popping up
repeatedly."

Rockwell was an ordinary man, with sexual thoughts and
desires, with knowledge that sexual perversities exist in
the world.

Often the humor in a Rockwell arises from the anxiety of
the situation he had chosen to depict. A doctor's office
where a kid has to drop his pants to get a shot. A funhouse
where the wind tunnel blows up a little girl's skirt and a
boy sees her underwear. A man looking at a piece of modern
art he's not sure he understands. "The jokiness is part of
the point, but often jokes are about things that make
people nervous or anxious, too," Halpern says. "I think he
was a very nervous person and I think the things that made
Rockwell nervous make other people nervous, things like
physical appearance and sexuality and the meanings of
masculinity and femininity and understanding modern art.
His work speaks to that."

Although Rockwell enjoyed financial success and
popularity, he chafed under the restrictions the
Saturday Evening Post editors placed on his art
(frequent deadlines, no painting cigarettes in the hands of
women or showing people drinking alcohol), and he envied
the freedom of noncommercial painters. And while many
Americans considered him their favorite painter, art
critics and insiders dismissed him as a commercial
illustrator, not an artist. It wasn't long before his work
became the embodiment of middlebrow kitsch. Even with a
growing recognition among some art critics of Rockwell's
excellence as an artist, that split in opinion still
remains.

Halpern emphasizes that his reading of Rockwell is not a
purely subjective affair. He is not making this stuff up.
This book is his interpretation of Rockwell's work, and it
includes observations that no one has made before, but it
is based on detailed readings of Rockwell's illustrations,
on supporting evidence found in Rockwell's body of work, in
the work of artists Rockwell referenced, and on Halpern's
knowledge of Rockwell's life. "I don't want people to
dismiss the book as one person's reading of what's there,"
he says.

Exhibit C: The Connoisseur (1962)

A well-dressed man stands in an art gallery, his back to
the viewer. He is studying a large paint-splattered canvas
that looks like it's by Jackson Pollock. His face as he
appraises the painting is hidden from view. The painting is
filled with color. The man and his surroundings are gray
and colorless.

This is a study in contrasts — between the composure
of Rockwell's realistic style, and the angry energy of the
Pollock-like painting's Abstract Expressionism. There is
the contrast between the chaos of the painting and the
composure of the man viewing it, and between the masculine
Pollock and the effeminate connoisseur, Halpern says.
Rockwell is also commenting on his own relationship to his
critics and to modern art. Clement Greenberg, the great
champion of Abstract Expressionism and of Pollock, marked
Rockwell in a famous essay as the embodiment of kitsch.
"Not only was Rockwell's work not receiving recognition in
the art world, but it was also being greeted with universal
contempt by the art world in the '50s and '60s, and I think
a lot of those resentments bubbled over in this painting,"
Halpern says. The man appreciating the painting is too
effete, too fastidious, and almost feminine. "I think he's
being mocked," Halpern says. "Even if he is enjoying the
painting, he is clearly someone who does not represent the
typical readers of the Saturday Evening Post."

Rockwell's attempts to be au courant are dated since, by
1962, Abstract Expressionism had been eclipsed by Pop Art
as the latest fad. What about the painting the connoisseur
is viewing? "On one level Rockwell is trying to literally
and figuratively contain Pollock," he says. "He has
reproduced what more or less looks like a Pollock, albeit a
pretty atrocious version of one. He's saying, 'I can do
you, but you can't do me.'"

Rockwell fans who learn of Halpern's book have been
less than generous in their assessment of his reading of
Rockwell. An October 2006 story about the book in The
Boston Globe headlined "Portrait of the Artist as a
Dirty Old Man" drew more than 50 responses on an online
message board. "What kind of pervert looks at a perfectly
innocent painting of a young girl and sees a sexual image?
I think someone should keep an eye on this guy," one reader
wrote. "I think Richard Halpern is the 'dirty old man,'"
someone else said. Another commented, "Rockwell's paintings
were timely and very well done, and his subjects were of
the highest standard. Another example of how our 'great
liberal schools' are screwing up the thoughts of the
world." And then there was this one: "Who do we need, the
Rockwells or the intellectuals?"

Halpern says he was surprised by the nature of the
criticism. He never accused Rockwell of being a pervert or
a pedophile or a dirty old man. Yet people who read the
news story assumed he had. Rockwell was an ordinary man,
one with sexual thoughts and desires, one with knowledge
that sexual perversities exist in the world. He was just
like anybody else, Halpern says. "I want to say that that
stuff is floating about generally — that it floats in
and out of everybody's mind," he says, "and that Rockwell
was aware of it."

What stung the most, he says, was the allegation that he
was trying to destroy ordinary people's appreciation of a
beloved artist. "I'm not trying to tear Rockwell down," he
says. "That charge bothered me because it underlined a
misunderstanding that what academics do is attack things
and tear them down. It's like people think of the professor
as a bogeyman."

When Halpern told people he was working on a book about
Norman Rockwell, they usually responded in one of two ways.
"Most of the people I knew found him so boring and banal
that they didn't give any thought to him," he says. "Other
people revered him for embodying a certain image of
American life." In a sense those two groups share the same
understanding of Rockwell, but value him differently. "One
group thinks he's banal and that he's falsified the world
he depicts. The people who revere him know it's not the
whole of the world, that it's not all true, but it's still
something they want to hold on to."

That split is in part what makes Halpern's book a difficult
sell, says Claridge, author of Norman Rockwell: A
Life. Many academics don't see the complexities of
Rockwell's work, and many of his die-hard fans are
unwilling to hear anything they construe as negative about
their champion of innocence. Claridge says she found
Halpern's book to be intelligent and provocative. "Often
there's a temptation when you do Freudian-influenced
analysis to go to extremes, but Halpern does not," she
says. "He doesn't make Rockwell's art a psychoanalytic
playfield. Once you read the analysis and you look at the
picture you say, 'Yes, right. That is going on.'"

She continues, "The majority of his examples held up
beautifully — that's why the typical Rockwell fan
would not want to go there. Part of America only wants to
believe Rockwell was only being innocent, but that's not
all there is. Whenever we think we're innocent, it is
extremely unlikely we are."

As an academic, Halpern says he's become used to his books
being well received but not popular. The Underside of
Innocence is different. In addition to The Boston
Globe, mainstream magazines including The Atlantic
Monthly and The London Spectator have written
about the book. The sales ranking for the book on
Amazon.com has climbed unusually high for a scholarly book
— something that didn't happen with Halpern's
previous books, all scholarly, all about Shakespeare or
poetry.

"This book has definitely generated more interest than
Shakespeare," says Halpern, who is currently researching a
book about political action in modern life as it relates to
the history of theater. "It's the most popular book I've
written, although that's not saying much."

He is laughing. "Among the lot of bad-selling books I've
done, this is the most successful failure."